Erica Sadun

The latest craze in hiring is the oldest craze in hiring—find employees that come highly recommended by their friends and colleagues. Social networking has always been used in a non-technological sense to find the perfect candidate or to find the perfect job. Now technology meets the job search.

Sites like Jobster, H3, and O'Reilly Connections have sprung up to bring potential employees together with potential employers—particularly those "passive" job applicants who are already employed and may not be actively searching for a new one. From Wired:

The recruiting sites are all about connections. Most share the goal of helping employers reach the coveted "passive" job applicant, which is recruiter lingo for the qualified person who is already gainfully employed and thus not maniacally reading job boards. Such people are often the best new hires, but are hard to reach through conventional advertising.